!Pura Vida¡

Well the last couple weeks have been great! Dain took off for Costa Rica for a couple weeks, so for the first week I spent the time in my community and my neighboring community where my friend Casey lives. We are currently working on writing a grant for a fish tank project in our two communities. The idea being supplying the people with tubing and seminars on implementation and maintenance of the tanks we can help people supply themselves with a constant source of protein, something they completely lack in their diet. We are both very excited about the project, which I will know more about in about a month. I will keep you posted.

So last week our group had a conference in the province of Cocle where each person brought a person from their communites and everyone learned how to design and implement projects within their communities. This conference was in hopes that each person at the conference could take these ideas back to their communities so the people could learn how to become more independant on themselves for soliciting projects. So besides being very educational (and long) the conference also gave people a chance to meet people from all parts of Panama, and it gave our group a chance to catch up on what everyone is doing. The beach was real close by so we spent alot of free time there. Some of the people had never been to the ocean before, pretty amazing.

So after the conference I came up to Costa Rica to meet up with Dain and a couple friends of ours; Leland (who has a dope house in San Jose and works for Tico Times), Alex C., Josiah and Mikah. All people from the same high school, what a random crew of people to all be meeting up in Costa Rica, thousands of miles from our native home in Eugene. So we only stayed one night in San Jose with Leland before taking off to the Carribean coast to hit the beach before my vacation runs out on the 3rd. The first place we stopped was called Cahuita, and now we are currently in Puerto Viejo right in between Cahuita and the border with Panama. Both places are just little beach towns with high tourist populations. In Cahuita we went for a hike in the park, the trail went along the beach for awhile before jutting into the peninsula jungle. We saw a ton of monkeys and one of them was very used to people, it just walked right up to us and took a banana out of Josiahs hand. Got tons of pictures (will post later) so beautiful. We saw lots of other wildlife too, a bright yellow viper, butterflies, monkeys (3 kinds), and 3 raccoons that ran right up to me and stole the bag I had in my hand that had my camera case with my money and stuff in it. We got it back before the thief before he got too far into the woods. I also got eaten alive by mosquitos and currently look like a mutant. I think I have cured my romanticism of the jungle for a little while. Then it has been raining for the last 24 hours or so...wish it would stop. Well I gotta run but just know I am having a great time and I love you all!~